I’m sorry but I just can’t line up my daily observations of some bikers’ and ebikers’ dangerous behavior in NYC vs that of drivers (who admittedly I have also seen drive dangerously) and the data often cited showing that drivers break just as many laws.
Call this some fallacy of observation or confirmation bias or whatever, but I see bikers biking the wrong way weaving between traffic on NYC streets, running red lights (generally when there are no cars, but hey, it’s still running a red light), and doing other dangerous-for-pedestrian things literally every time I go outside. A few months ago I was clipped by a biker going the wrong way through a red light as I was in the crosswalk. Almost a year ago a friend was hit full speed by a biker in the East Village and lost two teeth.
Of course a car hitting a pedestrian will be worse for the pedestrian than a bike in the same situation. But many bikers are dangerous too, at least in NYC, and when I walk the streets I’m more afraid of a biker coming out of nowhere than I am of a car doing the same.
I have a hard time understanding the knee-jerk reaction to marginialize how dangerous bikers can be when an article calls out this behavior. There’s always some counter argument about how dangerous cars are. They are both dangerous, now can we just admit this and start asking cities to police dangerous biking too?
> * and the data often cited showing that drivers break just as many laws.*
I’m also doubtful and suspect that the data is essentially cherry picked. Relative to distance travelled, I suspect cyclists do indeed break traffic laws more frequently. Especially if “severity” of violation is accounted for.
i.e. There’s often some jackass in a car who runs the red light shortly after it changes. However, despite the blatant law violation, it’s not that dangerous because it happens immediately after the light change and for better or worse, people expect it. Cyclists on the other hand will often blow through a light whenever they get there if they think they can make it through without getting hit, whether that’s right after the light changes or two minutes later. The car running the red light immediately after it changes is quite frequent but the cyclist running the light whenever it’s convenient is more egregious even if less frequent.
the data often cited showing that drivers break just as many laws
I think it's that drivers break laws in more predictable ways. They may run red lights in the first few seconds, not come to complete stops when required, and aggressively try to turn right on red. But for pedestrians, those actions are easier to foresee and protect against than the minority of cyclists who completely ignore traffic laws.
I’m wondering how many commenters here actually live in NYC. Delivery bikes are a menace. A 20-something guy in my building recently started hopping around on crutches. Athletic guy. Got hit by a food delivery bike and fractured his leg. I have a near miss at least once a week. They’re like darts that pop out of nowhere even on sidewalks, at full speed, sometimes swerving at the last second. Zero respect for any traffic laws. It’s especiaily dangerous if you have a dog as I do, esp when crossing a street, bc a bike can slice into the leash in the space between you and your dog, since the bikes pop out of nowhere so fast. I’m exceedingly cautious at night now in scanning around me at crosswalks.
I live in NYC and I bike every day. I have no problem with e-bikes and I think the fact that they are getting confiscated is extremely misguided given that they are receiving praise in many other cities as a smart alternative to cars. It's insane that the police in NYC are so concerned about these bikes killing people meanwhile there are dozens of bicyclists dying every year due to car accidents and virtually no bicycle-related pedestrian deaths. Biking is by far the most dangerous thing I ever do by an order of magnitude; I've almost been crushed by cars multiple times, I've actually been brushed by cars a couple of times, and multiple friends of mine have been hurt. I'm considering stopping biking because of this, but the truth is that it is so much faster than taking the train or walking that my morning commute from Greenpoint to LES would not really make much sense without a bike. I find it ironic that police are notorious for parking in bike lanes causing bikes to have to veer out into traffic to get around them, which is extremely dangerous. (See http://copsinbikelanes.tumblr.com/)
I understand that bikes are more concerning than cars for pedestrians due to being quiet and going the wrong way, and I hate as much as the next guy. It is bicyclists' responsibility to obey traffic laws. It seems that the police should enforce the laws against these e-bikes going the wrong way or not stopping at stop signs, not for existing in the first place.
When I tell folks in the US my bike has a bell they say "psssh like a car will hear that" they always seem surprised when I point out it's more of a polite alert to people walking. Because who walks, after all?
Also without the constant deadening roar of internal combustion, bells are fairly audible.
I know this will anger bikers, but: as a pedestrian in New York, I'm way more afraid of bikes than I am of cars. Cars are dangerous if they hit you, yes, but (a) you can basically always hear (and see) them coming, and (b) they very rarely drive against the traffic or run red lights.
Bikes, on the other hand, frequently zoom down one-way streets against the flow of traffic, rarely make any audible sound (whether ringing a bell or shouting) so you can hear them coming, and treat traffic lights as suggestions.
I can't count the number of times I've almost gotten hit (as a pedestrian)by a biker when I'm crossing a street with the walk signal, because a biker decided that he could barrel down a one-way street, against the traffic, and didn't even need to bother to slow down for pedestrians walking with the walk signal.
Yes, not all bikers are like that. But there are enough of them that they pose an actual problem for NYC pedestrians.
I love bikes and bikers, but think that the kind of freedom some of us exhibit is dangerous. We should abide more by the rules for bikes, as we expected the car drivers to abide by their own rules.
If when we bike we break the rules, we might generate dangerous situations for pedestrians, for ourselves and for cars. It took me while to realize this.
On the other side, if the rules are inappropriate, then yes, we have to bargain for new rules. But the article did not added anything about this. God thanks I do not need to register my bike and get a plate!
But we might need to develop a test to get a e-bike license :)
I love how they're making it an "immigrant" issue and the gig-economy companies are "abdicating responsibility". Meanwhile actual residents of NYC are vehemently against how reckless and dangerous these people are. It's a good example of how agendas in the media have gotten out of control.
If delivery using cyclists is unsafe and they should slow down, it seems like the city has to go after the businesses that provide the incentive to speed.
Maybe enforce a minimum elapsed time and price for a delivery? If they get there sooner, they have to wait for the next job.
Of course it's never going to be that simple, but it seems like you have start with incentives if you're ever going to get anywhere. Services like GrubHub gather lots of data and it could be used to improve safety, but apparently isn't?
Maybe make the services partially liable for any accidents, and they'll make some changes in their routing?
The incentives need to be useful though. Realistically it’s Google doing the routing anyway and cyclists ignore it when they know a faster path. GrubHub cannot reasonably fix that unless they’re going to fine delivery workers when they deviate from the route, which seems absurd given that delivery workers will legitimately deviate for faster routes that are equally safe.
Making GrubHub liable for accidents also doesn’t do much. Accidents are relatively uncommon anyway and it’s probably very affordable to just eat the cost. Plus I’m not sure how GrubHub would force safer cycling even if they were incentivized to do so.
Those electric bikes are a nightmare. They are so quiet you can't hear them coming. Coupled with how recklessly the delivery guys ride them it's a recipe for disaster. These guys plow through red lights and gun it in the opposite direction on one way streets. Maybe it wouldn't be a problem if these guys didn't ride like assholes.
We don't ban cars. Yet most drivers break laws daily, whether it be failure to signal, exceeding the posted speed limit, or blocking a crosswalk or intersection. No one talks about banning cars outright, even though they kill far more innocent bystanders. If there are dangerous ebike operators they should be ticketed and fined.
In a world with global warming where many cities stated goal is to reduce vehicle miles traveled, it doesn't make sense to ban a valid mode of transportation.
"We don't ban cars. Yet most drivers break laws daily..." Your explanation is in your own statement. The cars aren't breaking the laws. The drivers are. They are penalized for breaking laws, and if they continue or break a law serious enough, they will be banned from driving.
This is actually a legitimate critique of what I wrote. Vehicle operators, from ebikes riders to motorists need to be the ones blamed for crashes and other bad behaviors. That said, my post is advocating for the same treatment of bikers as drivers. The government doesn't generally seize cars (unless it's blocking traffic or parking), the same process should be applied to bikes.
Just two days Dorothy Bruns in Park Slope ran through a red light, killed a four year old and a one year old. A pregnant woman is still in critical condition. She hasn't been arrested.
Maybe the NYPD should concentrate on felonies before worrying about violations.
"They startled me" is a bad reason to think something is unsafe. I'd wager if you saturated the streets of any American city with "rude" ebike riders, the serious injury rate would go down pretty quickly, as drivers learned to accept humans in the street.
Why would we? Asking motor vehicle drivers to "share the road" with bicycle riders is asinine, destined to fail, and uniquely American.
And I say this having grown up my entire life without a car, biking everywhere. I'd take tickets for riding on the sidewalk, and I'll do it every single day I ride. Sharing a road with 2500lb vehicles that go 2-5x my speed is unsafe and all the talking and lane marking in the world will never undo that fact. Nevermind how utterly anti-social and rude you must be to bike in a lane 20mph under the speed limit.
I spend as much time as possible in the Netherlands since they seem to be about the only sane country when it comes to mixed-mode transportation and not trying to murder people while doing so.
But is it asinine and destined to fail? I'm not sure.
I think that it IS possible to share the roads but only under low-traffic and low-speed conditions.
The worst offenders are cyclists on busy dual-carriageways during peak hour and it is horrendously dangerous, with two lanes of traffic forced to snake around a single cyclist.
On side streets however I don't think it's a big deal at all.
As much as I don't like to malign modes of transportation which are environmentally friendly, cases like this are exactly why regulation is introduced. Once you get large numbers of people getting away with borderline criminal behaviour, regulation is brought in to explicitly deal with it to deal with the now commonly occurring edge cases.
Of course corporate entities don't want it, they tend to be pro-deregulation. So injuries have been downplayed because, as others have said, they are not deaths.
This could perhaps be handled by requiring registration of all vehicles for commercial purposes, as they are usually under the most pressure to increase throughput and thus bend rules. This would deal with the issue of unfairly disadvantaging the poor who need the economy afforded by bike transport, while dealing with the exploitation of the lack of regulation by corporate entities.
"..calling them a public threat because their riders exceed speed limits and disobey traffic laws by riding the wrong way on streets and on sidewalks. This reasoning is faulty: Do Lee, a researcher at CUNY Graduate Center and organizer with The Biking Public Project, which works to amplify the voices of underrepresented cyclists like delivery workers, tells Fast Company he has found no evidence in his research that e-bikes have ever killed anyone.."
The reasoning contained in this excerpt is faulty, and it's so glaring I'm surprised the editor let it through - hasn't killed anyone yet <> is a public threat!
As someone who doesn't live in the USA I've always wondered: NYC (heavily DNC?) routinely seems to do things that are far more inhuman and racist than anything the GOP does, how come it never generates the same level of outcry?
The mayor of New York was a Republican from 1994 to 2014. If your impression about city policies were accurate, that would not count against the Democratic party in the way you seem to imply.
But I don't think your impression about the city is all that accurate to begin with. New York being the largest and highest profile US city, you hear more news about it than about other parts of the US, but you shouldn't be drawing inferences about the rest of US from the absence of news that reaches you.
Call this some fallacy of observation or confirmation bias or whatever, but I see bikers biking the wrong way weaving between traffic on NYC streets, running red lights (generally when there are no cars, but hey, it’s still running a red light), and doing other dangerous-for-pedestrian things literally every time I go outside. A few months ago I was clipped by a biker going the wrong way through a red light as I was in the crosswalk. Almost a year ago a friend was hit full speed by a biker in the East Village and lost two teeth.
Of course a car hitting a pedestrian will be worse for the pedestrian than a bike in the same situation. But many bikers are dangerous too, at least in NYC, and when I walk the streets I’m more afraid of a biker coming out of nowhere than I am of a car doing the same.
I have a hard time understanding the knee-jerk reaction to marginialize how dangerous bikers can be when an article calls out this behavior. There’s always some counter argument about how dangerous cars are. They are both dangerous, now can we just admit this and start asking cities to police dangerous biking too?